The Given Sacrifice

A Novel of the Change

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Overview

Praised as a “truly original combination of postapocalyptic sci-fi and military-oriented medieval fantasy,”* S. M. Stirling’s Novels of the Change depict a future without technology, where people must master skills from ages past in order to survive. Now, to ensure that survival for all he cares for, a king faces his greatest challenge in the latest chapter of the New York Times bestselling saga….

Rudi Mackenzie has won the battle that expelled the enemy from the new High Kingdom of Montival. Now he must free the people who live in the state once known as Idaho from occupation by the legions of the Church Universal and Triumphant and pursue them to their lair over the mountains. There he will finally confront the forces behind the Church—the Powers of the Void.

Yet even a victory will not end the conflict forever. The Powers of the Void are malevolent and infinitely patient, and the struggle is one that involves the entire world. They threaten Rudi not only in the present, but also in the future represented by his children, Órlaith and John. Rudi knows this.

And as his heir Princess Órlaith grows up in the shadow of her famous father, she also realizes that the enemy will do anything to see that she does not live to fulfill her parents’ dream….

The Given Sacrifice

Praise

“Stirling has blazed a clear comet trail across his postapocalyptic landscape that illuminates both the best and the worst of which our species is capable.”—Science Fiction Weekly

“Nobody wrecks a world better than S. M. Stirling, and nobody does a better job of showing that people remain people, with all their high points and low, in the wreckage.”—Harry Turtledove, New York Times Bestselling Author of Supervolcano: All Fall Down

“[A] richly realized story of swordplay and intrigue.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Absorbing.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

“[A] vivid portrait of a world gone insane…full of bloody action, exposition that expands character, and telling detail that makes it all seem very real.”—Statesman Journal (Salem, OR)

“As usual, S. M. Stirling delivers a rich world readers want to live in. Fully formed and alive characters you wish you could drink a beer with or follow into battle.”—PNC-Minnesota Bureau

“Stirling’s historical research is always impeccable, and his ability to use that knowledge and understanding of everything from ancient weapons to regional accents to a foodie’s obsession with good eats creates a world you can see, feel, and touch.”—Otherwhere Gazette

Series

Dear Reader Letter

Like most fantasy and Sci-Fi writers, I read the works of Robert E. Howard at an impressionable age, and along with Tolkein and Anderson and the other greats he was influential in shaping my imaginarium. Howard is one of those writers whose reputation has been damaged by his own success — the limited corpus of his own work has been diluted by an ocean of well–meaning (or simply mercenary) pastiche. Howard himself was purely self–taught, but at its best his writing style is surprisingly spare, with a headlong impetus and a brooding romanticism. While he was writing, he believed.

One of the things that impressed me back in those long–gone days was his worldbuilding. Howard wanted a playpen where he could have all the most gorgeous settings of historical adventure — from Vikings to ancient Egypt to Spanish Main pirates — in one massive savory salmagundi, and he came up with one in his Hyborian Age.

Of course, being a pioneer, and being stuck in rural Texas in the 1920’s and 30’s with all the limitations on research material that implies, his effort was crude in some respects. The stitching shows.

When I was designing the background for the Change World series, I wanted something with comparable amplitude, but smoother design. I wanted (among other things) a world with the amplitude to tell wide–ranging stories with an interesting mix of peoples and cultures. This being a post–apocalyptic tale of a particular type, these would be new cultures, based on existing ones but scrambled by the Change, the removal of high–energy technologies and the catastrophes which followed… and also influenced by memories of the past. Including folk–memories and myths.

History is not truly cyclical; the past is irrecoverably gone. But ideas about the past are enormously influential; we cannot inhabit the past, but we cannot escape from it either, any more than you can outrun your own sweat.

Just to take one example, the Puritans who created New England were convinced that they were “returning“ to a primitive Christianity very like that of the time of the Apostles. They were wrong; what they created was largely new, and suffused with fifteen hundred years of religious and cultural history. But themyth of a return to the origins was extremely powerful and had real–world consequences — not least a tendency to return to the Old Testament for inspiration.

Likewise, many of the peoples and cultures which form in a process of “ethnogensis“ after the Change think they’re returning to the remote past, but they’re not.

On of the things that happens in the real world is that time goes on and one generation succeeds another; nothing makes a secondary world feel thinner and more artificial than neglecting this.

In The Given Sacrifice, the world the Change made is passing from its first heroic age into a more settled existence. Things are no longer so fluid; cultures and kingdoms are taking shape, and slowly the different parts of the world are coming into contact once more. The children of the survivors are the parents of a new generation, one that never knew the people who knew the world before the Change. To them, the new world is simply natural — the only existence they have ever known. The events of the Change and its aftermath are receding into myth themselves.

The Given Sacrifice is a story of this transition. The towering figures of the post–Change generation, such as Rudi Mackenzie — also known as Artos the First, High King of Montival — overshadow their world. But their children, first and foremost his daughter Orlaith, are stepping onto the stage.